Houston's WWII sailor in famous kissing photo dies at 86

By Craig Hlavaty |
March 14, 2014
| Updated: March 14, 2014 8:00pm

Glenn carried this photograph around for quite a while and a friend,
Lloyd Sullivan, restored the photograph taking hours to make sure he did
not harm the signatures. The signatures included Dale Ernhardt, Richard
Petty, Kyle Petty, and Bobby Allison, whom McDuffie had all befriended.
(Photos courtesy of Rene Armstrong)

(Photos courtesy of Rene Armstrong)

McDuffie and his daughter Glenda (Photos courtesy of Rene Armstrong)

(Photos courtesy of Rene Armstrong)

(Photos courtesy of Rene Armstrong)

(Photos courtesy of Rene Armstrong)

Photo By Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty

A jubilant American sailor clutching a white-uniformed nurse in a back-bending, passionate kiss as he vents his joy while thousands jam Times Square to celebrate the long awaited-victory over Japan.

Photo By PAT SULLIVAN/AP

Glenn McDuffie holds a portrait of himself as a young man, left, and a copy of Alfred Eisenstaedt's iconic Life magazine shot of a sailor embracing a nurse. McDuffie says he is the sailor in the photo.

Photo By Provided by Glenn McDuffie

A photo of Glenn McDuffie taken in 1945.

Photo By Melissa Phillip/Chronicle

Glenn McDuffie, 80, shown outside his Houston home Friday.

Photo By PAT SULLIVAN/AP

Houston Police Department's forensic artist Lois Gibson looks over some of the photographs she used to prove that Glenn McDuffie was the sailor shown in Alfred Eisenstaedt's photograph.

Photo By PAT SULLIVAN/AP

Glenn McDuffie talks about the day in 1945 he heard World War II was over, kissed a nurse in Times Square and had his picture taken by Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Photo By Photo provided by Lois Gibson

Glenn McDuffie holding the iconic photograph.

Photo By Photo provided by Lois Gibson

During her investigation, Lois Gibson compared Glenn Duffie's hairline, and found a match.

Glenn Edward McDuffie, the young sailor from Houston who can be seen in one of the most iconic photos from the end of World War II, has died, according to family members.

The Navy veteran was 86.

McDuffie was 18 when he said he was captured in the famous kiss photo with nurse Edith Shain.

“I heard someone running and stopping right in front of us. I raised my head up, and it was a photographer,” McDuffie told the Houston Chronicle in 2007. “I tried to get my hand out of the way so I wouldn’t block her face, and I kissed her just long enough for him to take the picture.”

McDuffie collaborated with Houston Police Department’s forensic artist, Lois Gibson, in 2007 to prove that he was the sailor sharing that lusty kiss with Shain in Times Square on Aug. 14, 1945. The kiss was captured by famous Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt on V-J Day.

Eisenstaedt's famous photo is currently on view in the exhibit "Made for Magazines: Iconic 20th Century Photographs" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Gibson said when she first met McDuffie that he was frustrated at not being acknowledged as the sailor in the photo.

Gibson, who has done numerous reconstructions of crime victims’ faces using only a skull, carefully studied the bone structure of all 11 men who claimed to be the sailor before concluding the man in the photo was McDuffie.

After taking precise measurements of McDuffie’s wrists, knuckles, arms, forehead and ears, Gibson compared them to enlargements of the famous photo. To replicate the image, Gibson had McDuffie pose embracing a pillow, a substitute for the nurse.

She said Friday that McDuffie didn’t want a real-life stand in for the nurse.

“I was able to eliminate all the others based on their foreheads, or the superciliary arch — where the eyebrows are,” she said.

Gibson spent much of the last decade championing McDuffie’s claim.

“Glenn told me that there was no tongue in the kiss, but that it was a wet one,” she said on Friday.

Gibson said the reason McDuffie’s left arm was cocked the way it was in the picture was because he was half-expecting a jealous boyfriend or husband to come at him.

McDuffie, who spent 50 years in Houston before moving in 2009 to North Texas to live with his daughter, spent his later years traveling the gun and air show circuits, signing copies of the famous photo for fans. Many women would ask to rec-reate the kiss with him, but they usually got to kiss his cheek, Gibson said.

McDuffie enjoyed the celebrity status that came with him being identified as the sailor in the famous photo.

“My dad loved it, he ate it up,” said Glenda Bell, his daughter. “He finally got the recognition that he deserved after so many men tried to say that it was them in the photo.”

Any time someone invited him to come somewhere, like fund-raisers for veterans, McDuffie was there, Bell said.

“He would recreate the kiss with women happily, but not with men,” she said. He even re-created it with Diane Sawyer once for a TV segment.

He needed help with crowd control, Bell said. When he appeared in public, he was mobbed with attention, which he didn’t shy away from.

“He would wear his WWII veterans cap, and that alone would gain him attention,” she said. "When they found out who he was, they would all get tears in their eyes.”

Bell said her father will be interred next week at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery.